I first came across Mike Rohde's sketchnotes from SXSW 2009. My husband showed them to me and I was absolutely mesmerized by them. My husband started to sketchnote a chapter from a book and asked me to refine some of the lettering on it. From there, we continued to do sketchnotes on books and videos with him doing the drawings and me doing the text.

2. How this impacted on your life/work/thinking?

It has impacted my life in that I've been approached by Clients to do sketchnotes for them and have been able to supplement our income by doing sketchnotes. Imagine, getting paid to draw stick figures! I also learned I have a gift for hand drawn typography, something I used to do throughout school growing up and have since been able to revisit. #

3. Sketchnotes: digital or analogical? Why?

I used to be anti-digital and did sketchnotes strictly with pen/paper/markers/highlighters/colored pencils. I thought it was more authentic to use actual ink and paper. However, it was extremely difficult to make changes to sketchnotes this way, and sometimes Clients would request changes after the fact. So I caved and learned to draw digitally. It has made my work so much easier to produce and recolor. Now, I do about 95% of my drawings digitally. I draw on Pixelmator or iDraw using a Wacom tablet.

4. Share a Sketchnote secret tip with us!

There are no rules! Who says you can't have a sloppy first draft and redo/refine into a second draft? I retain information even better by doing a very rough initial sketch then going back and redoing it a second time. The 2nd time around I'm not rushed and can add all the bells and whistles.

5. What future do you foresee for Sketchnote/Visual Arts?

I'm seeing more and more people doing Sketchnotes these days and taking notes this way. Some people don't move on to do more than one, but there's an even larger number of people who continue on to pump out more than just one sketchnote. And they just keep looking better and better with practice! I'm very excited to see what people continue come up with and contribute to the sketchnoting community.

Bonus: The Sketchnote Workbook: can you tell us something about it?

The Coconut Cream Pie piece which is featured in the book is a recipe you might see in a video game, which is why you see things like "Item Level," "Statistics," and "Buy from food vendor." It was inspired while playing Final Fantasy XXIV, and I mixed in some World of Warcraft in the recipe too!